If you’re a regular Irreal reader, you’ll be familiar with Charles Choi. He often has useful takes on Emacs matters and, of course, he’s the author of the excellent Casual Suite that helps you use all the arcane features of many familiar Emacs commands.
Early on in his Emacs career, Choi tried Eshell but it didn’t take. That’s because, he says, he was expecting it to act like a normal shell, which it most certainly doesn’t. Now Choi has a post that offers a second take on Eshell. It’s a take informed by Choi’s many years of using Emacs and learning to appreciate Eshell.
Choi says that you should begin by thinking of Eshell as offering an Emacs REPL that can easily reference the command line utilities traditionally accessed through a conventional shell. He gives several examples of how that works.
He also mentions something that I’ve noticed too. He now does most of the things he used to do in a conventional shell through Emacs functionality like Dired and Magit. He has a table in his post that compares various shell tasks with their corresponding Eshell equivalents.
I try to use Eshell whenever I need a shell but I haven’t internalized the Eshell way as Choi has. Reading his post has inspired me to do better and try to use Eshell more often. One way to do that is to use Eshell instead of using a key shortcut or Meta+x to invoke Emacs functions such as Dired.
If you’d like to improve your Emacs game, take a look at Choi’s post. There’s a lot of meat in it.